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Sightseeing

‘Orkney,’ by Amy Sackville

“A tiny, perfect, whittled trinket found bedded in the sand”; “a brightness quivering against the coming rain”; “a modern-day Venus” who inspires “a fin-de-siècle fever”: these are a few descriptions of the young wife in “Orkney,” Amy Sackville’s masterfully self-contained second novel. If they sound dismayingly vague and romantic, that’s because the words belong not to the writer, but to the narrator, Richard, a professor who has recently married his most gifted student. She asks him to take her to the sea, and he gallantly makes arrangements for a honeymoon in the northern Scottish archipelago of Orkney, giving no thought to what she will do once he must return to his academic responsibilities. “We talked once of her working on her doctorate with me,” he muses, “but that would be impossible now.” When he thinks of their future, he imagines “a perpetual breakfast table.”

Richard is 60; his wife — he never uses her name — is 21. The newlyweds spend nights entangled by the fire in their little cottage, protected from the wind (“some ancient, rag-winged, shrieking thing”) and the icy ocean (“on it washed and wished, senseless”). They drink hot whisky and tell stories of “island sorcery.” When she spins a complex yarn supposedly gleaned from a seal she met on the beach, Richard goads her playfully: “I knew you’d had some secret from him. That sly little pup.”

It ought to be a cozy coexistence, shared mornings and evenings separated by days of individual endeavor: she explores the beach and sea caves while Richard works on his book. The trouble is he can’t keep his eyes off her. While she befriends the housecleaner (an intrusive “one-woman tourist attraction” with “a gimlet stare out of poked holes in the dough”) and an elderly man who lives on the beach (an “old sea-troll,” in the narrator’s grotesque imagination, “cramming his toothless face with sardines”), Richard spies on her from the house. “I’m sorry I moved beyond your frame, Richard,” his wife says when he worries that he cannot see her from the window.

Despite Sackville’s explicit references to the male gaze, she is full of compassion for the male gazer. Richard, at work on a study of 19th-century enchantment narratives, calls his wife “my Lamia” and “Merlin’s last folly,” referring to Keats’s and Tennyson’s tales of great men destroyed by the love of beautiful, unworldly women. Indeed, all of “Orkney” could be read as a reimagining of the poems “Lamia” or “Merlin and Vivien.” But Richard’s preoccupation with such tales profitably complicates this reading. To his wife’s irritation, he romanticizes their first meeting in a seminar room: “You brought the cold in with you, the crisp of the first frost and the leaves already falling; they were tangled in your hair — ‘They were not,’ she said, with a little shove, ‘I’m not a vagrant’ — but so I saw you, darling, an autumn sprite, come in from the first chill.” When he insists she was wearing purple, “the color of the heather on the heath,” she counters that she has never owned such a garment. Still, he is determined to turn the story of their love into the kind of fairy tale to which he has been addicted since he was an undergraduate (“I can’t quite shake the image of her in purple”).

Because Richard is oblivious to his wife’s inner life, we come to know her through the mundane: how she looks (“long spine”; silver hair; “pale pink areolae, green veins coursing just below the surface”), how she dresses (“a baggy pair of linen trousers tucked into chunky socks and boots”), how she cooks (“eggs scrambled to a single, solid wad of brown rubber”), her “morning ritual”: “She sat at the table, ruffling her hair into a fluffed cloud, squeezing shut her eyes as if to clear them of salt water, rubbing her fair brows into disorder with strong fingertips, and then looked up at me apparently revived.”

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Keith Negley

Sackville’s rare gift is for rendering the ordinary so distinctly that it becomes fantastic. Her first novel, “The Still Point,” in which a 19th-century woman spends decades vainly awaiting her husband’s return from an expedition to the North Pole, was less assured. She subjects her vivid tale of ambition and longing to a tidy conclusion that leaves no psychological stone unturned. In “Orkney,” although exegesis makes a few unfortunate appearances (“What is the nature of this enchantment? Or is it only madness, or a dream, and if so, whose?”), Sackville does not force sense onto feeling. As in “Nightwood,” by Djuna Barnes, and “The Waves,” by Virginia Woolf, the prose in “Orkney” is so compelling one does not read to find out what happens, but to find out how it will be described.

Consider Sackville’s portrait of the narcissism of refusing the beloved the right to her own moods. When Richard’s wife wakes up sad on the penultimate day of their honeymoon, he wants her to fake jollity. He is unable to accept her gloominess without taking it as a reflection of her feelings for him.

“After another long, hollow silence, I asked, Are you O.K.? Not wanting to ask. She scraped at the inside of the egg without eating. Are you happy? I said, despite myself. She made a sort of moaning, sighing noise, rubbed her face with her hands, working the fingertips into her pale brows and pulling them down so the tiny line between them was pulled flat, her closed eyelids stretched. I love that tiny line, that little track of contemplation, in seminars the appearance of that line was my triumph; I cannot imagine it now, I can’t think of a single intelligent thing I might have said to elicit it. She slid her hands down so that her fingers cupped her cheekbones and her palms met at her mouth, pursing it. She sat like that for a little, quiet while as I looked on, helplessly attentive to this gesture of despair. I got up to make coffee. I’m sorry, I said, trying not to sound wretched.”

Richard is much more comfortable with the image of his wife standing on the beach, “bright, defiant, only just or almost manifest, between the sea and the sky.” Why does he want to believe that his wife is a “shape-shifting goddess” who has “bewitched my heart”? It’s an old story; one of Ford Madox Ford’s characters called it the saddest story: masculine passion depends upon the urge to know a woman so completely as “to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported.” But the rewards of such a conquest cannot last, for no sooner does the man fully know the woman than her identity becomes dully human, distinct from his own. He is disenchanted, restored to the aloneness he had hoped, impossibly, that she would relieve. What is refreshing about Sackville as a young female writer — she was born in 1981 — is that she engages such traditional gender consciousness in the service of a new romantic model: the femme fatale is not a heartless manipulator, but a passionate woman who understands that passion is not sustainable; lasting love depends on accepting the distance that inevitably intrudes between lovers.

Sackville evokes this longing in language that is both redolent and precise. The explorer’s young wife in “The Still Point,” suspecting that her husband will never return, lies in bed and imagines that she is in a small boat drifting on an open sea, finding some comfort in the sense that “everything is equidistant, all is far from me as he is far from me.” It is consoling to sink into the depth of the universal feeling instead of being stabbed repeatedly by remembrance of the particulars one can remember but not possess.

No such consolation arrives in Sackville’s bolder “Orkney,” for particularity is all Richard has of his wife. The way she drinks coffee, for instance: “She heaped sugar in, filled the mug to the brim with milk, bent her head to sample it without lifting it from the table; put her lips out to it like some cautious proboscoid insect, sipped noisily, and smiled. ‘No bad,’ she said, in her best Orcadian accent.” Sackville may mock Richard’s pompous fictionalizing, but she has only compassion for the ache that drives it.

ORKNEY

By Amy Sackville

253 pp. Counterpoint. $25.

Correction: July 14, 2013

A review on June 30 about “Orkney,” by Amy Sackville, referred incorrectly to the locality that gives the book its title. It is a Scottish county and an archipelago, consisting of the Orkney Islands, not an island itself. (There is no single island named Orkney in the group.)

Hannah Tennant-Moore’s criticism has appeared in The New Republic, n+1 and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

A version of this review appears in print on June 30, 2013, on page BR21 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Sightseeing. Today's Paper|Subscribe